Bot News
The Locator

By Brian Proffitt

One thing is for sure, I could have used this bot last Christmas.

Known just as "The Locator," this bot creation of Mike Woods fills an interesting and highly selective niche in the realm of shopping bots. Rather than searching multiple sites for many items, this bot will search sites for a few specific items.

In fact, right now, the only item the bot will look for is the highly prized PlayStation 2 video game console.

Unlike other shopping bots, The Locator will not price the items it finds; it simply tells you where they are available. But for hard-to-get items, this is a nice service. It is made even nicer still by the fact that this bot will e-mail you or contact you by instant message and inform you that it has found the item you seek.

At this time, only e-mail and AIM-format instant messages are supported, though Woods is hoping to add ICQ and Yahoo instant message support soon.

Visitors to the site need only register when they arrive, providing minimum contact information for the bot to find you. You can also recommend new items for the bot to search for and new sites for the bot to search on.

When users pass along their suggestions, their account will have the item added to their personal search list. "I have the database designed so that individual users can watch items privately, but it's not enabled since I am redesigning part of the searching/posting bot," Woods explained.

Woods cites another difference between his bot and other shopping bots. By many users implementing his single bot, "this prevents the thousands of robots from DOS'ing [denial of service] a Web site."

"My main goal is to take the load of bot hits off company web sites," he added.

Woods has some definite plans for his bot in upcoming months. He plans to launch a client-side version of his bot that would essentially replace the AIM messaging client.

But would the proliferation of many Locator clients defeat the purpose of turning down the number of hits on a commerce site? Not the way Woods has it mapped out.

The Locator's searching and reporting functions would still be hosted on just a single server, which would then pass on the requests to the commerce sites.

Right now, The Locator is still in early development, but look for this bot to improve in the near future.